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My guest today is Bonnie Blaylock, author of The Water Women, listed in the Textile Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oQagNFbwEzI

• Premise for the novel: three generations of Sardinian women guard the ancient craft of byssus weaving, golden "sea silk" harvested from a mollusk, until a 1942 wartime secret changes what gets passed down the family line.
• Byssus 101, or the beard of the world's largest mollusk: how a single photo of the Pinna nobilis, a clam that grows up to four feet tall off the coast of Sardinia, sent Bonnie down the research hole that became this novel, and why the last woman still practicing the craft isn't sure she'll pass it on.
• Researching a place she's never been: how Google Earth, Street View, and D.H. Lawrence's century-old travelogue Sea and Sardinia stood in for a research trip that kept getting cancelled, including a would-be crossing of her own that she and her husband missed by literal hours.
• The mothers-and-daughters engine underneath it all: how losing her own mother at 24 and gaining her first granddaughter mid-manuscript shaped a novel about what parents hand down to their children, intentionally or not, and whether the children get to choose what they keep.
• Sardinia's hidden World War II history: churches built over synagogues, Mussolini's presence on the island, and the mysterious prehistoric Nuraghi ruins Bonnie used as a setting
• Writing a character readers love to hate: why Zaneta, the second-generation "water woman," divides readers, and Bonnie's case for giving her grace.
• Duty to those before us versus responsibility to those who come after, or, as Bonnie puts it, "can I say both are true?"
• Reading from The Water Women: an excerpt from Mira's perspective, a fishing line, a hum you can feel in your chest, and a mother trying to let her daughter become whoever she's going to become.
• Queen Berenice and the real rule of sea silk: the tradition, said to trace back to a queen referenced in the New Testament, that byssus can only ever be given as a gift, never sold.
• Why textile arts don't get their due: a conversation about "women's work" being just as worthy of serious treatment as anything hanging in a gallery.
• What's next: The Lookout, to be published in March 2027, based on the real first woman fire lookout in the northern California mountains and the sister who hiked up supplies to her for fourteen summers.

Read more from Bonnie Blaylock at bonnieblaylock.com

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Jillian Forsberg, author of The Porcelain Menagerie, listed in the Decorative Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-c1T9q46_Ys

• Premise for the novel: how a king's obsession with "white gold" porcelain drives two intertwined stories set decades apart. Fatima, a stolen Turkish handmaiden turned royal mistress, is put in charge of Augustus the Strong's exotic menagerie, and Johann Kändler, is the sculptor commissioned to capture that same menagerie in life-size porcelain.
• From a rhino to a rabbit hole: how Jillian stumbled onto the Meissen porcelain story while researching her first novel, The Rhino Keeper, after discovering that Clara, the real touring Indian rhino, once visited a porcelain factory.
• Augustus the Strong, elected king: how a Protestant elector converted to Catholicism and bribed, drank, and gambled his way onto the Polish throne, and built one of Europe's greatest art collections while treating people, and animals, as expendable.
• The treasure that survived a firebombing: why so much of Augustus's Green Vault collection escaped the WWII destruction of Dresden, hidden away because Hitler valued art as well.
• Johann Kändler, prisoner and genius: the real sculptor who, once inside the Meissen factory, could never really leave, and the parallel Jillian draws between his captivity and the caged animals he spent his life sculpting.
• Fatima's menagerie as agency: why a woman with no control over her own life, stolen as a child and handed to a king, built her power around the one thing she was allowed to love.
• Trading soldiers for porcelain: the true, almost unbelievable story behind Augustus swapping 600 fully armed dragoon soldiers for a shipment of Chinese porcelain pots.
• Finding Kändler's grave: Jillian's research trip to Meissen, and the eerie discovery that her Airbnb kitchen window looked straight down on the churchyard where he's buried.
• Reading from The Porcelain Menagerie: the purposefully written content warning for chapter 30, and an excerpt from Fatima's chapter 16 as she races to meet a new shipment of animals for the menagerie.
• Writing complicated characters: what Jillian learned about giving a villain one redemptive act and a heroine real flaws, instead of clean-cut Disney heroes and villains.
• What's next: two manuscripts on submission, a retelling of Daniel in the lions' den from the female lion keeper's perspective and a French Revolution novel set at the Salpêtrière asylum, plus a bridal-industry memoir, The Heirloom Finder, coming from the University of Kansas Press.

Read more from Jillian Forsberg at jillianforsberg.com

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Kerry Chaput, author of The Secret Courtesan, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fkX-QqvmnQg

• Premise for the novel: how a marble Venetian sculpture, surfacing after 400 years and credited to a male artist, sends Mia, a modern-day arts authenticator looking for the woman she is sure had carved it.
• Kerry found documented women painters of the Renaissance and Baroque, but no large-scale women sculptors, and decided that gap in the record was the story worth telling.
• Artemisia's dusty painting: the real-life rediscovery of an Artemisia Gentileschi painting in a Hampton Court storage room, proof that misattributed women's art isn't just a plot device.
• Veronica Franco and the real courtesans: how the film Dangerous Beauty and its real-life subject, Renaissance Venice's premier courtesan, inspired the character of Sofia, and why courtesans had more freedom, education, and political access than "respectable" women of the era.
• Pitched as The Da Vinci Code with a feminist twist: the puzzles and cliffhangers built into Mia's modern timeline, and why Kerry had to finish writing Sofia's 1609 story before she could solve Mia's.
• Zero outline, one nice bow: Kerry's pantser process from first page to last, alternating between timelines and following "wormholes" even when they lead nowhere.
• The hardest research wasn't the history: why untangling art authentication, auction houses, and international law was tougher than 17th-century Venice, and how friends in the art world helped her build a plausible Sotheby's-style plot.
• A law against something means someone was doing it: the logic behind laws barring women from studying art and obtaining materials, and what that says about who was quietly doing both anyway.
• Writing women who already have a voice: why Kerry skipped the "she finds her voice" arc for Sofia, and how a story about a woman claiming power she already has changes the whole shape of the narrative.
• Reading from The Secret Courtesan: a 2 a.m. library scene between Mia and fellow historian Noah as her theory about the sculptor's true identity finally comes out.
• What's next: Kerry's ongoing Substack, Badass Women in History, and her continued fascination with the women the historical record left out.

Read more from Kerry Chaput on her Substack, Badass Women in History: https://kerrychaput.substack.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Nancy Burkhalter, author of The Education of Delhomme, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RNohgRLMv4c

• Why Chopin needed a piano tuner: how Nancy, tuning pianos herself while listening to Chopin, realized he "had to have" one, and that's how the novel's narrator, Delhomme, was born.
• Blending fact and fiction: the wall-sized timeline, real history on top, novel's action below, that kept Delhomme's Paris anchored to the actual events of 1848 without letting fiction outrun fact.
• A poor man's bargain: why Delhomme, broke and desperate, falls prey to Vidocq, the monarchy's real-life spymaster, and agrees to spy on George Sand, the very woman he ends up competing with for Chopin's attention.
• Writing an unsympathetic narrator: Nancy's surprise at hearing Delhomme called an anti-hero, and why she never saw him that way, just a man doing what he had to do.
• Falling out of love with George Sand, then back in: how Nancy resented Sand for leaving Chopin, until a visit to Sand's home at Nohant, complete with a puppet theater Sand built for her son, turned her around, and why she gave Sand her own voice through diary entries woven into the book.
• Tuning by ear, writing by feel: what years as a working piano tuner taught her about touch and temperament, and how much of that craft to hand readers without losing them.
• The piano as character: why the instruments in the novel feel like living things, wood that expands and contracts, vulnerable to a fireplace or a spilled glass of wine, and how a tuner's instincts shaped Delhomme's reactions to Chopin's world.
• Finding Chopin's real tuner: a thin, out-of-print book written by the daughter of Chopin's actual piano tuner, discovered by chance in a University of Washington library.
• Vidocq, the spy who wrote himself: how the real historical spymaster, found in a reference book called Spies, handed Nancy a ready-made thriller plot, con-man origins and all, that she couldn't have invented herself.
• What's next: a novel about Franz Mesmer and his quest for medical legitimacy, and a subplot inspired by Nancy's own grandmother's history with mental illness.
• Reading from The Education of Delhomme: the Jardin des Tuileries scene where Delhomme meets George Sand for the first time and stews in jealousy as Chopin describes a ruined Bösendorfer and his plan to give Sand a prized ring.
• What Nancy learned: how a two-year manuscript completion class taught her to find the goal of every scene, why she still doesn't outline, and her advice to track down living historical experts, since "they love it" when a novelist calls.

Read more about Nancy Burkhalter on her website: https://www.nancyburkhalter.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Lynn Cullen, author of When We Were Brilliant, listed in the Photography and Film categories on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/86MVn-3LjhY

• Eve Arnold, the only woman Marilyn Monroe ever let photograph her: who she was, why Lynn had never heard of her either, and the shock of discovering that among all of Marilyn's photographers, there were no other women.
• Using Eve's own coffee table book on Marilyn as the novel's framework: six photo shoots over ten years, with scenes built around individual photographs, including the famous mirror shot.
• The ghost of Marilyn: standing on the actual Seven Year Itch subway grate in New York on a windless night when Lynn's coat suddenly swirled up around her, and how that moment made her feel responsible for getting Marilyn right.
• Why Marilyn sought Eve out, never the reverse: Lynn's hypothesis that Marilyn trusted Eve and wanted Norma Jean to get some credit, showing up for Eve's camera looking nothing like the bombshell the world knew.
• Reclaiming Marilyn from the victim narrative: a self-made, intelligent woman with real agency whom the studios fought because she had power, and why the "Hollywood made you and broke you" line from Candle in the Wind is exactly what Eve set out to correct.
• The verdict of Eve's grandson Michael Arnold: "You so captured my grandmother," and how Lynn ended up at the National Portrait Gallery's Marilyn centenary exhibition with him.
• The accidental second person: how a "mistake" at page 60, with Eve addressing Marilyn as "you," revealed the book as Eve's love letter and apology, despite Lynn resisting it at first.
• Photography as relationship: what Lynn learned about portrait photography, what a subject gives each photographer, and why Eve never had a subject like Marilyn again.
• The perennial choice women face: Eve's struggle as a working mother traveling the world as a top photographer.
• Setting the record straight on Marilyn's death at 36: an accidental overdose by a woman who had gone furniture shopping that day and had plans for plays and movies.
• Reading from When We Were Brilliant: the chaotic beach scene where Eve first meets Marilyn, a Botticelli Venus in a white bikini and army boots descending a cliff into a feeding frenzy of gawkers.
• What Lynn learned: to let the novel speak, even when the story demands a choice you resisted, and that eight books in, you still need beginner's mind.

Read more about Lynn Cullen on her website: https://lynncullen.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Kate Whouley, author of The Maestro and Her Protégé, listed in the Music category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fr_fJ9t9G_o

• Nadia Boulanger, the most influential music teacher of the 20th century: who she was, why she matters, and how Kate first encountered her by way of her terrifying theory professor when she was a music student.
• Inventing Hannah Schaefer, a fictional conductor who studies with the very real Boulanger, Leonard Bernstein, and Philip Glass.
• The demanding mentorship paradox: why Boulanger's near-dictatorial teaching style was exactly what Hannah needed, and when that kind of discipline helps versus harms.
• Women on the podium: why female conductors are rare even today, and what it feels like to be at the top of your game and still have to fight battles a man in the same position wouldn't.
• Structuring a novel like a musical composition: Overture, Reverie, Rhapsody, and Coda, and why Kate ultimately let go of strict sonata form.
• What women give up: Hannah's choice to be married to music, Boulanger's infamous black-edged sympathy cards sent to promising students who married, and the question Hannah faces at 58: could there be more?
• Grief as artistic processing: the cluster of losses Hannah suffers, how she writes pieces for the dead rather than mourning them, and why that catches up with her.
• Paris as a character: ten years of research trips, sobbing at Boulanger's grave in Montparnasse, and the moment Kate threw out her draft and understood the real story.
• From memoir to fiction and back: how writing Cottage for Sale and Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, her memoir about her mother's early-onset Alzheimer's, shaped her approach to the novel.
• Reading from The Maestro and Her Protégé.
• What Kate learned: that it's okay to follow the characters, that every word must have a reason to exist (Boulanger again), and that some books like to be written late at night.

Read more about Kate Whouley on her website: https://katewhouley.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Elisabeth Storrs, author of Fables and Lies, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lCJfOypSQr4

• The genesis of Fables and Lies: how a 30-year obsession with Priam's Gold and its mysterious disappearance after the Russians took it from Berlin led Elisabeth to create Freya, a young German woman working at the Museum of Pre- and Early History in Berlin as the war closes in.
• Himmler's SS Ahnenerbe, the pseudo-academic research institute that weaponized archaeology to justify Nazi ideology, and how the curator of Freya's museum being a member of it transformed what began as a novel about two women into something far more complex and sinister.
• The real inspiration behind Indiana Jones: Himmler's belief in the occult, Atlantis, and the Holy Grail, and the expeditions he sent to Tibet and Bolivia that Spielberg later drew on.
• Writing from inside the Nazi regime: Elisabeth's personal hesitation about telling the story from a German point of view given her father's experience as an Australian soldier in World War II, and why she decided the story needed to be told anyway.
• The Brenner family as microcosm: how Freya, her morally anchored father Konrad, her MAGA-adjacent mother Elsa, and her fully indoctrinated sister Volla each represent a different response to life under the Reich.
• Why Freya had to start as a true believer: the challenge of creating a protagonist who is indoctrinated, the small cracks in her worldview from the opening pages, and how Darien, the Cambridge-educated outsider archaeologist, opens her eyes.
• Berlin as a character in the novel: Elisabeth's research trip to the city, the walking tour with a Humboldt University history student, and the discovery that the Museum of Pre- and Early History sat next door to Gestapo headquarters on what is now the Topography of Terror site.
• The parallels to today: how Elisabeth finished the novel before the current global rise of fascism made it feel even more relevant, and what the preconditions for Hitler's rise in Weimar Germany have in common with what we are seeing now.
• The carpet bombing of Berlin, the Soviet artillery siege, and the absurdity of dropping leaflets telling civilians to overthrow the regime while destroying their city around them.
• A reading from the opening pages of Fables and Lies: Freya cycling home through Berlin on 24 August 1939, and her first encounter with Dieter, the jazz-loving teenager whose punishment plants the first seed of doubt.
• What Elisabeth is working on next: a four-timeline novel tracing Priam's Gold from a Bronze Age goldsmith in Troy through Schliemann's 1873 discovery, the Russian Trophy Brigade, and Freya's granddaughter piecing it all together in the 1990s.

Read more about Elisabeth Storrs on her website: https://elisabethstorrs.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...

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My guest today is Caroline Woods, author of The Lunar Housewife, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0nJmxXJcrQQ

• How Caroline discovered the CIA's secret program to fund and shape American literary culture during the Cold War, including its involvement in the founding of the Paris Review, and why she saw a novel in it.
• The real-life women who inspired Louise: the aspiring writers and girlfriends surrounding the men at the center of the 1950s New York literary scene, and the female journalist who eventually broke the story decades later.
• The novel within a novel structure: why Louise's book had to be science fiction, how its chapters shift as Louise's disillusionment deepens, and the freedom of writing a melodramatic '50s romance as an "implied author" who isn't Caroline.
• The Hemingway interview at the heart of the book, based on Lillian Ross's real New Yorker profile, and how Hemingway, who is portrayed here as a kind of fairy godmother to Louise, inadvertently became Caroline's writing coach for the whole novel.
• Class tension in the 1950s literary world: why Louise's working-class origins matter in a scene dominated by Harvard and Yale men, and what that gave her as a character and as someone for readers to root for.
• How the title came about -- originally The Long Leash, the CIA's own term for the program -- and why her agent's suggestion of The Lunar Housewife did so much more work for the book.
• Writing The Lunar Housewife in spring 2020, during COVID lockdown, with a four-year-old and a one-year-old, writing after bedtime every night, and why that particular moment gave the lunar colony chapters their flavor.
• Why the 1950s is having a moment in historical fiction: the scrim of conformity and domestic bliss concealing postwar darkness, the seeds of the counterculture, and women who had tasted wartime freedom and had it yanked back.
• The common thread across Caroline's novels -- The Mesmerist, For All the Moons, and The Lunar Housewife -- women who question the status quo and push against systems, often in the face of government interference in private life.
• Caroline's advice to writers: write every single day (not just on Saturdays), and write what genuinely entertains you because if you're having fun, the reader will feel it.
• Reading from the opening pages of The Lunar Housewife: the launch party for Downtown magazine's second issue.

Read more about Caroline Woods on her website: https://www.carolinewoodsauthor.com/

Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.

Also, check out Art In Fiction at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2500+ novels inspired by the arts in 11 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Photography, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.

Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Check out her website...